Copyright and Ownership: Who Made Who?

When working with a web design company, there will be a great deal of new material incorporated, such as graphical elements, logos, photos and video. Some of these may be generated by the web design firm, some may be purchased from third parties, and some generated by you and your company. So who owns what?

Photographs and Videos

If you purchase stock photos you must make sure you buy royalty-free photos. These are available from a wide variety of sources such as istockphoto.com and shutterstock.com. Royalty free photos are those that you are free to use on your site for commercial purposes, and your company has the right to use them forever. If you hire a photographer for custom work, they may want to charge you for the work and add yearly rights fees. It is preferable to purchase the rights to the photos in perpetuity so you can use them for as long as you wish.

Some photos are available from sites like Flickr and WikiMedia Commons that can be used for non-commercial purposes through a Creative Commons license. This license allows photos to be used for non-commercial purposes, usually with an attribution. While these photos shouldn’t be used for a main website, they can be used on your company’s blog as long as you link to the original source.

Videos are much the same as photographs. Some are available for purchase, some via Creative Commons license, and some may be produced by a videographer you hire. The same conditions outlined above for photos apply for video.

Graphics and Logos

All company logos should be registered trademarks, and thus are owned by your company. Graphics created for your website are slightly different: while your web designer won’t use those same graphics again, they are free to use similar concepts and color schemes in future projects. And of course another company may decide to use your site as inspiration. It is just not possible to prevent someone else from “stealing” your site’s look and feel, as the web is an open environment. Protect yourself by trademarking all logos and wordmarks.

The Portfolio Exception

All material created by third parties may be used in a portfolio as a representative sample of their work. You evaluated your web designer and photographer by looking at their portfolios, so you would expect and hope that the work they do for you is included in future iterations.